Interior day. A young woman in profile, in a house dress, is intent on reading a letter that she holds with both hands. A cold, bluish light spreads in the room, perhaps filtered from an invisible window. The furnishings are essential: a few dark wooden chairs with brass studs, a table covered with a cloth, on which a pearl necklace, a sheet - perhaps another letter - and an open box are placed, as if it had just been rummaged through.

The girl, with her hair tied up, appears to be pregnant, as suggested by the soft roundness of her belly and the blue jacket - a beddejak, a bed jacket - closed with small bows of the same color.

Behind her, the wall is partially covered by a large map.

The protagonist is completely absorbed in the reading; the observer is excluded from this private scene, suspended in a dense silence. Nothing is revealed, everything remains withheld: questions arise without finding answers. What does that letter contain? Who wrote it? And why is the young woman holding the sheet with such force?

With the exhibition of the Woman in Blue Reading a Letter by Vermeer, coming from the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam and visible at Palazzo Madama from March 5 to June 29, 2026, the Encounter with the Masterpiece begins, a new exhibition cycle dedicated to the great protagonists of ancient and modern art history. For the first time, Turin welcomes a painting by Vermeer: an extraordinary opportunity that allows the public to directly engage with one of the absolute pinnacles of European painting of the seventeenth century.

Not just "excellent loans," but real projects of scientific and cultural deepening, built as narrative devices capable of generating knowledge, stimulating interdisciplinary dialogue, and opening new perspectives on heritage. 

The exhibition offers an interpretation of Vermeer and his work not only as a master of light and domestic interiors, but as the author of an authentic "mental painting," the result of an optical and conceptual revolution that permeates Dutch culture of the seventeenth century.